In the past decade, many organisations have become much more conscious of sustainability with innovation in their manufacturing and supply chain management (Kusi-Sarpong, Gupta, and Sarkis 2019). This trend has been driven by several compelling observations and challenges. The earth is facing serious environmental degradation issues. Many economies are under stringent environmental legislations. Several highly disastrous industry accidents brought to light social sustainability issues in offshore production. Competition continues to intensify in many product and service sectors. Many global supply chains were severely disrupted by man-made or natural disasters. Consequently, many organisations have invested in capabilities to enhance their continuity of business and resilience to shocks, and/or have implemented strategies for improving environmental and social sustainability (Hsu et al. 2013; Tseng et al. 2019). Innovative concepts, technologies, and business models are often at the heart of these initiatives, enabling organisations to deliver superior value to stakeholders (Orji and Liu 2020). Large companies such as Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, and Walmart have been using a global data-collection platform to engage their suppliers to achieve transparency about the environmental impact (Dahlmann and Roehrich 2019). This special issue is created in order to explore the innovative sustainability for manufacturing and supply chain. It includes in total 13 research papers under the categories of positioning papers, framework related to supply chain network, enabling technologies, decision and business models, and industrial cases. The first paper entitled Sustainable innovation in the dairy supply chain: enabling factors for intermodal transportation, by Cannas Violetta, Ciccullo Federica, Pero Margherita, Cigolini Roberto, and Ruci Meriola, introduces an innovative sustainability in the diary supply chain by investigating how to ease the shift to intermodal railroad transportation. Through multiple case studies, this paper discusses a set of enablers of the shift such as a blueprint for innovative technology as well as logistics and business models. The second paper An innovative decision making framework for evaluating transportation service providers based on sustainable criteria, by Paul Ananna, Moktadir Md. Abdul, and Paul Sanjoy Kumar, demonstrates an innovative decision-making framework based on sustainable criteria to examine the transportation service providers. The proposed framework combines both qualitative and quantitative aspects for enabling a decision support tool for end-users.